Fryderyk Chopin (1810 - 1849) Music for Cello and Piano Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 65 Polonaise bri1lante in C major, Op. 3 (ed. Emanuel...
Fryderyk Chopin (1810 - 1849)
Music for Cello and Piano
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Op. 65
Polonaise bri1lante in C major, Op. 3
(ed. Emanuel Feuennann)
Grand Duo Concertant in E major on Themes from Robert le Diable
(in co1laboration with Auguste Franchomme)
Nocturne in C sharp minor, B.I. 49
(arr. Gregor Piatigorsky)
Étude in E minor, Op. 25, No.7
(arr. Alexander Glazunov)
Waltz in A minor, Op. 34, No.2
(arr. Lev Ginzburg)
Étude in D minor, Op. 10, No.6
(arr. Alexander Glazunov)
Fryderyk Chopin was born in 1810 at Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw. His father
Nicolas Chopin was French by birth but had moved to Poland to work as an
accounting clerk, later serving as tutor to the Laczynski family and thereafter
to the family of Count Skarbek, one of whose poorer relatives he married. His
subsequent career led him to the Warsaw Lyceum as a respected teacher of French,
and it was there that his only son, Fryderyk, godson of Count Skarbek, whose
Christian name he took, passed his childhood.
Chopin showed an early talent for music. He learned the piano from his mother
and then with the eccentric Adalbert Zywny, a violinist of Bohemian origin, and
as fiercely Polish as Chopin's father. His later training in music was with
Jozef Elsner, director of the Warsaw Conservatory, at first as a private pupil
and then as a student of that institution.
In the 1820s Chopin had already begun to win for himself a considerable local
reputation, but Warsaw offered relatively limited opportunities. In 1830 he set
out for Vienna, a city where he had aroused interest on a visit in the previous
year and where he now hoped to make a more lasting impression. The time,
however, was ill-suited to his purpose. Vienna was not short of pianists, and
Thalberg, in particular, had out-played the rest of the field. During the months
he spent there Chopin attracted little attention, and resolved to move to Paris.
The greater part of Chopin's professional career was to be spent in France,
and particularly in Paris, where he established himself as a fashionable teacher
and as a performer in the houses of the rich. His playing in the concert hall
was of a style less likely to please than that of the more flamboyant Liszt or
than the technical virtuosity of Kalkbrenner. It was in the more refined
ambience of the fashionable salon that his genius as a composer and as a
performer, with its intimacy, elegance and delicacy of nuance, found its place.
Chopin could not but admire the ability of Liszt, while not sharing his taste
in music. His own background had been severely classical, based on the music of
Bach, Mozart and Haydn, and by these standards Beethoven, the object of
adulation for Liszt and his circle, seemed on occasion uncouth, by comparison
with the classical restraint of Mozart's pupil Hummel. At the same time he held
reservations about the Bohemian way of life that Liszt followed, although he
himself was to become involved in a liaison with the novelist George Sand (Aurore
Dudevant), which lasted for some ten years, coming to an end two years before
his death, while Liszt's more dramatic association with another married woman, a
less successful blue-stocking, the Comtesse d'Agoult, forced his withdrawal from
Paris society. Both women were to take literary revenge on their paramours.
Paris was to provide Chopin with a substantial enough income as a teacher,
and there was a ready market for his compositions, however reluctant he might be
to commit them to paper. The country retreat of George Sand at Nohant provided a
change of air that was certainly healthier for him than that of Mallorca, where,
in 1838, the couple spent a disastrous winter that intensified the weakness of
Chopin's lungs, already affected by the tuberculosis from which he was to die.
In 1848 political disturbances in Paris made teaching impossible, and Chopin
left the city for a tour of England and Scotland. By this time his health had
deteriorated considerably. At the end of the year he returned to Paris, now too
weak to play or to teach and dependent on the generosity of others for
subsistence. He died there on 17th October, 1849.
The greater part of Chopin's music was written for his own instrument, the
piano. At first it seemed that works for piano and orchestra would be a
necessary part of his stock-in-trade, but the position he found for himself in
Paris enabled him to write principally for the piano alone, in a characteristic
idiom that derives some inspiration from contemporary Italian opera, much from
the music of Poland, and still more from his own adventurous approach to harmony
and his own sheer technical ability as a player.
Among the compositions of Chopin for instruments other than the piano are
three works for cello and piano. The most substantial of these is the Sonata
in G minor, Opus 65, written in Paris in 1845 and 1846. It was dedicated to
his friend, the cellist Auguste Franchomme, and the last three movements were
played in 1848 by Franchomme and Chopin at the latter's last concert. The first
movement, marked Allegro moderato, starts with the first phrase of the
first subject, played by the piano and then taken up and extended by the cello.
There is a B flat major second subject and this leads, after a closing passage,
to the central development, which opens with a reference to the principal theme
and continues with delicate exploration of other keys and an abridged
recapitulation. The D minor Scherzo allows the cello the opening melody,
before a more equitable division of labour. To this the D major trio section
acts as a foil, with the cello now enjoying melodic prominence, before the
return of the scherzo. There is a shift of key to B flat major for the slow
movement Largo, opening with a singing cello melody, taken up gently by
the piano. The last movement opens dramatically enough, the piano theme taken up
by the cello, which later introduces the contrasting second subject, presented
simply enough at first, before being offered in a varied form, with cello
double-stopping and allowing, from the piano, a resumption of the tarantella
rhythm that dominates the movement, gathering energy as the end approaches. The
piano writing is characteristic throughout, but the voice of the cello remains
clearly differentiated.
The first work for cello and piano in order of composition, the Polonaise
brillante in C major, Opus 3, was written in 1829 and 1830 and published the
following year in Vienna. Chopin had received encouragement from Prince Antoine
Radziwill and it was during a visit to his estate in the autumn of 1829 that he
wrote the Polonaise to which he later added an Introduction. In a
letter to his friend Titus Woyciechowski he described it as a brilliant
drawing-room piece suitable for the ladies and designed for the Prince's
daughter, Princess Wanda, Chopin's pupil, who played it with her father, who
played the cello. The published work was dedicated to the Warsaw cellist Joseph
Merk. The Introduction, marked Lento, opens with a piano flourish,
after which the cello introduces part of an expressive melody, interrupted by
the piano. The cello resumes, leading to the principal theme of the Introduction.
The music moves dramatically into the minor and the section ends with a
cadenza, in the edition by Emanuel Feuermann entrusted to the cello. The Alla
Polacca, better suited, perhaps, to the abilities of the Radziwills, allows
the cello the first attempt at the polonaise theme, which is then taken up by
the piano. Again, in the present edition an element of virtuosity is entrusted
to the cello, in a linking passage that leads back to the principal theme. There
is a heartfelt F major theme from the cello, but it is the principal theme which
eventually dominates.
The Grand Duo Concertant in E major is very different in origin. It
is based on themes from Meyerbeer's opera Robert le Diable, a work
that strongly impressed Chopin when he first arrived in Paris, though his taste
for this kind of grand opera diminished as time went on. The work was first
staged at the Opera on 21st November 1831 and won astounding success. Pianists
in Paris, Thalberg, Herz, Adam, Kalkbrenner and Liszt, tumed to it for
transcriptions, fantasies and other derivative works. In his own Grand Duo based
on themes from the opera Chopin collaborated with the cellist Auguste Franchomme,
who rewrote the cello part of the earlier Polonaise brillante and
arranged for cello and piano two Nocturnes by Chopin and possibly other
works.
The piano opens the C sharp minor Introduction, marked Largo, allowing
only the briefest appearance of the cello, before announcing the first theme,
marked Andantino. The work makes use of the first act Romanza and
the chorus Non pietà from the same act, as well as the fifth act Le
mie cure ancor dei cielo, among other elements from the opera, and is in a
style well able to hold its own with the transcriptions and arrangements of
other Paris piano virtuosi.
The present release ends with four transcriptions of piano works for ce1lo
and piano, a practice that continues the work of Franchomme in this respect. The
Nocturne, B.I. 49 dates from 1830 and was published sixteen years after
Chopin's death. The present arrangement is by the great cellist Gregor
Piatigorsky. The well known Étude, Opus 25, No.7, from the second
set of studies, here in a transcription by Glazunov, transposed from C sharp
minor to E minor, has a melody that lends itself well to the cello, as does the
gentle melancholy of the Waltz, Opus 34, No.2, of 1831, transcribed by
the Russian cellist Lev Ginzburg. The final transcription, of the Étude,
Opus 10, No.6, dating probably from the summer of 1830, Chopin's last summer
in Warsaw, provides a moving postscript, the transcription and transposition
from E flat minor to D minor by Glazunov.
Maria Kliegel
Maria Kliegel achieved significant success in 1981, when she was awarded the
Grand Prix in the Rostropovich Competition. Born in Dillenburg, Germany, she
began learning the cello at the age of ten and first came to public attention
five years later, when, as a student at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, she
twice won first prize in the Jugend Musiziert competition. She later studied in
America with Janos Starker, serving as his assistant, and, subsequently
appeared in a phenomenal series of concerts in America, Switzerland and France,
with Rostropovich as conductor. She has since then enjoyed an international
career of growing distinction as a soloist and recitalist, offering an amazingly
wide repertoire, ranging from Bach and Vieuxtemps to the contemporary.
Bernd Glemser
A prize-winner on no less than seventeen occasions in international
competitions, the young German pianist Bernd Glemser was born in Dürbheim and
was still a pupil of Vitalij Margulis when he was appointed professor at the Saarbrücken
Musikhochschule, in succession to Andor Foldes, himself the successor of Walter
Gieseking. In 1992 he won the Andor Foldes Prize and in 1993 the first European
Pianists' Prize. With a wide repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the
contemporary , Bernd Glemser has a particular affection for the virtuoso music
of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, the work of Liszt,
Tausig, Godowski, Busoni, and especially that of Rachmaninov. His career has
brought appearances at major music festivals and leading concert halls
throughout Europe and further afield.